Chapter 7

The pattern, once set, held.

Frances fell into it the way she had once fallen into the rhythm of a long competitive season. Rise, train, rest, repeat. The specifics changed day to day but were still a routine that settled into something she no longer had to think her way through. She entered the Training Pocket and gave herself over to technique rather than mere survival: footwork was drilled until it stopped feeling deliberate, shield work was refined stroke by stroke, and the accuracy of her thrusts was sharpened against orc after orc until a clean hit to the eye or throat became less a matter of luck and more a matter of habit. Her shield, battered past saving more than once, was patched by Haldor and eventually simply replaced outright. She traded her light arming sword for one of the heavier one-handed blades from her backup set, judging, correctly, that the added weight would do more for her conditioning than the speed of the lighter blade was worth while she still had strength to build. She drew her bouts out deliberately now, where once she had rushed them, trading efficiency for training volume, treating each clash less as a fight to survive and more as a rep to be logged.

The changes in her body came slowly, and then all at once. Within four more rounds of training, she stopped losing weight. A round after that, the scale was measured in how her gambeson sat and how Haldor’s frown deepened or eased at each fitting. Muscle replaced what fat remained. Her arms thickened through the forearm and shoulder. Her back broadened. Her legs, which had carried her reluctantly through a decade and a half of parent-teacher conferences and grocery runs, were now stronger than they had been when she was a competitive fencer. She began not to notice the thirty pounds of chain mail she carried. It was just a background load that became almost natural. She kept to an hour of stretching each time she entered or left the Study Pocket, Giovanni’s warning lodged firmly enough in her mind that she never considered skipping it, and the strength kept coming.

Her mental outlook climbed in step with her body. She faced death and pain, by now, on a near-constant basis. She pushed herself past the point of collapse as a matter of routine. In her old life, this pace would have broken her within a week. Here, it didn’t, because Giovanni was always there, patient and steady, mending muscle tears and cuts and bruises and once, memorably, a set of ligaments torn clean through in her knee, with the same unhurried competence he’d shown on the very first morning.

She lost track, somewhere in the accumulating days, of exactly how many times she had gone through the archway of the Training Pocket. The knot of mages who had gathered for the first bell on that first morning had long since dispersed to other business, their curiosity about her training satisfied or exhausted or simply overtaken by the ordinary demands of the Academy. What remained, steady and constant, was a smaller circle: Haldor, Edmund, Marguerite, and Giovanni, the four of them orbiting her training with the quiet reliability of people who had each, in their own way, decided this was worth their time.

“Haldor,” she asked one evening, or what passed for evening, in a place where the sun didn’t actually set, “how many times have I gone in now?”

Haldor considered the question with the air of a man doing real arithmetic. “Somewhat more than fifty, my lady.”

Frances let that sit a moment, and then gave the three of them gathered in the Study Pocket a small nod. “Thank you, all of you, for sticking with this.”

They only smiled, but Haldor laughed outright.

“To you, my lady, this may well have felt as though nearly sixty days of training had passed. For us, outside these walls, it has been less than a single day.” He shook his head slowly. “I am learning as much as you are, in truth. I have never in my years seen a Pocket used in such a manner.”

Frances considered that for a moment, and found herself turning it over in her head. “I’ve been thinking about how this could be used in an actual military campaign,” she said. “There’s a saying from a general back in my world. His army was as well resourced and was well trained as any could ask for, and he said, ‘You can ask me for anything you like, except time.’ Time is the one resource you can only ever spend, never save. But a pocket universe running at a different rate? That changes the equation completely.” She shook her head, setting the thought aside for later. “Anyway. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to training.”

She turned the conversation toward what came next. “I think I’m finished training on orcs,” she told Haldor. “My strength and conditioning have come a long way. My shield work is more than adequate now, and my sword work is certainly good enough against something as slow as an orc. I’ve been limiting myself to a maximum of eight spawns at a time. I want to get through them as fast as I can and see what the Pocket throws at me after.”